Creme DeL'Essense is an ambitious hidden gem in the North End

For the past year, in an industrial park in Winnipeg’s North End, two guys in their early 20s have been pumping out some of the most unique
dishes in the city.

They are doing things like taking two weeks to ferment their
own black garlic (one step involves a 75C sous-vide for 12 days), which then
goes into dishes like the Noypi Rice Bowl – made with braised tocino and
langgonisa – and a brunch dish of duck confit perched on waffles with a
maple-black garlic glaze.

There’s fresh pasta with a black garlic Alfredo sauce, a
hash dish featuring a braised pork belly roulade served with pickled cucumbers
and a slow poached egg, and a dish of pork belly ribs covered in a pineapple-tomato
jam. There’s even a deconstructed lemon tart on the dessert menu.

You can savour this in a bare-bones diner setting, in a nondescript
white brick building at #16 – 1833
Inkster Boulevard.

Ryan San Diego and RJ Urbano (PCG)

“We are in the North End of the city, and you are not going
to see anything like this around here,” said executive chef and primary owner
RJ Urbano, who along with Ryan San Diego does absolutely everything at
Crème DeL’Essense.

“We love to see people’s reaction to the menu… now, I’m not
saying it is the fanciest or anything, but we do like to put a lot of detail and
care into it.”

Urbano and San Diego, both just 23 and 22 years old
respectively, met in 2008 at Tec Voc High School. Urbano has the more
pronounced culinary background while San Diego has front-of-the-house and
bartender experience (the restaurant is also licensed and features a cocktail
menu).

They run the show almost like tag team wrestlers. They can
both take orders and switch off in the kitchen, while they also do all the prep
for service. It is seriously just a two-man show.

Their menu pays homage to their Filipino roots with some
items, but above all it is a fusion of French and brunch classics. The portion
sizes are generous to say the least (which Urbano says is a must for the
neighbourhood, “you should leave full”), while the prices go from $7.50 (for
the mixed green salad), up to $20 (for the pork belly ribs).

Owning a restaurant at 23 years old was never in
Urbano’s plans.

He started cooking three-and-a-half years ago at Sun Valley
Restaurant (433 Oak Point Highway), shortly after withdrawing from University 1
at the University of Manitoba. He then enrolled at Red River College’s Culinary
Arts program, during which he had his first big "ah-ha" cooking moment while
working as a line cook at JOEY Polo Park.

At JOEY he was introduced to a fast-paced kitchen and
learned to work in a system, but it was their weekly “Quick Fire Challenges” –
a black-box style challenge the kitchen staff do every Tuesday – that he
really relished.

“I would skip theory classes [at Red River] just to take
part in those challenges,” said Urbano.

Every year the chefs from the two JOEY kitchens (Kenaston
and Polo Park) would compete against one another, with the winner being flown
to the flagship JOEY in Vancouver to compete with chefs from across the
country. Urbano would win that right to represent Winnipeg in April of 2014.

The mushroom forage (PCG)

After that, things just started to snowball.

“The experience was phenomenal, even just being exposed to
Vancouver for the first time,” said Urbano.

That city had such an influence on him that he returned
twice to eat his way through Van for more inspiration before opening Crème
DeL’Essense.

He did his college co-op placement under chef Jesse Friesen
at Winnipeg’s Lobby on York, and from there – with the help of former Lobby
manager Shan Shuwera – he landed a stage back in Vancouver at PiDGiN, where he spent a week and a
half learning everything he could from former Winnipegger and now internationally
celebrated chef Makoto Ono.

(For a little background: Shuwera used to work with Ono at
Gluttons, the former Winnipeg restaurant that launched Ono to culinary
stardom when he won the Canadian Culinary Championships in 2007.)

Before opening Crème in August of 2015, Urbano’s first
independent foray was an underground ice cream business. He was
making varieties like Vietnamese coffee, Matcha green tea, and salted caramel
Oreo, and quickly garnered a following on Instagram that resulted in people
lining up at his house.

He followed this up with a short stint doing macaroon ice
cream sandwiches. This all started because he found a Breville Ice Cream Maker on
Kijiji for $200. #hustle

Weekly new ice creams are a mainstay on the Crème menu, and
it was these that customers were first showing up for. I had the salted caramel
on my visit and it was banging; the crème anglaise is rich in egg yolks, providing a super creamy texture, while the salted caramel provides nice pops of
crystallized sugar and salt. There are also four other desserts that include a
sticky toffee pudding and a seasonal crème brûlée.

The 15 savoury items, many of which scream brunch, are
eclectic to say the least, and include the aforementioned Filipino fusion
dishes, a creamy Parisian gnocchi ($16), and the “mushroom forage” ($11) -- a savoury
dish with criminis cooked in a brown butter-soy served with chèvre and toasted
almond dust.

Salted caramel ice cream (PCG)

The standout for me was that duck confit and waffles ($19,
while you can get a confit chicken leg version for $14). It has a lot going on,
including scallions and paprika working beside a light hollandaise that somehow
complements that black garlic-maple glaze. The yeast-batter waffles are airy, the
rich duck meat is spoon tender under the crispy skin, and when you get all
the components together on one fork it all makes sense. The flavour profile is
actually quite similar to an okonomiyaki, although it could do
without the paprika.

There’s really nothing like some of these dishes in the
city, let alone in a North End greasy spoon.

“Our purpose to be in the North End wasn’t because it was
cheap,” said Urbano.

“It was because we grew up in this area; we went to Meadows
West, we went to Stanley [Knowles], Sisler, Tec Voc, and we noticed that there
was no one in this end of the city. Plus, this lease was available and people
were starting to get interested in it.”

“And yeah, people do ask us, why didn’t we open in Osborne or
on Corydon? Well, everybody is there.”

Urbano’s hope is that Crème, which officially opened on
August 12, 2015, will continue to evolve into a destination restaurant – which
it arguably is already. I’ve had chefs telling me for the past year that I need to see the ambitious dishes that this young chef is doing,
while it keeps on popping up on our Instagram feed as new people discover this
hidden gem.

So far, it has been going as planned for Urbano and San Diego,
as they honestly didn’t have the clearest blueprint to start.

“For us, we are very young, and we had no experience with [running
a] business. We we went into this blindfolded,” said Urbano.

“But we survived the first year. So we just want to keep
innovating and really striving to be better than we were yesterday.”

Crème DeL’Essense is
open seven days a week, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., then 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.